Black walnuts

[Reno]

Anyone here from the period if 30 years ago when we all dyed most everything in walnuts? Still do. With surgeries I’m not as able to get out anymore. Serious heart surgery and now one kidney removed plus a couple other surgeries just for good measure. But I still see leather make straps and work on my muzzleloaders.
but walnut Dying is ages old. After I boiled mine I poured in a few bottles if rubbing alcohol. Sometimes I just put the walnuts into a large trash or garbage can Filled it with water and let it stand a while. Worked great.

 

[Tenring]

I would boil down poke berry’s and make cresting stain for arrows. It turns into like a midnight purple, really cool with clear over it.

 

[Tenring]

Just so I understand when making walnut stain do you boil down that outer green leathery layer before the nut or smash the whole thing and boil. Come on guys throw me a bone here. Ha ha, but seriously I would like to make some for my squirrel rifle build.

 

[Mad Michael]

have you tried them with black walnuts

Yes we have, It is kind of serial thing. You set the washers so that it is just barely tight enough to crack them. reset them 1/2 washer smaller and do it again. Then push the limits of your vocabulary as you pick the meat pieces out of the shells and wondering why you did this. Unlike english/carpathian walnuts you can't blow through 100 pounds in a couple of hours and you need to have the machine bolted down on something sturdier than the old redwood table in the picture and with better clamps than the cheapos I usually use. My wife and I work together, usually we can only tolerate about 10 pounds of black walnut meats a year, but it is enough for us. Another thing, Dave, the fellow who built the thing, told me when I picked it up, it was better to use only half circle swings of the handle rather than full circle. when cracking hard nuts--Black Walnut, Ginko, pistachio, etc.--this practice will also give you more half nuts than the complete turning. Like you we go through a lot of acorns every year.

Have you ever added oak gall to your steel wool, black walnut mix? When I get it right it turns out a very dark almost indigo blue-black ink.

Mad Michael

 

[George]

Does anybody process the black walnuts or are they more trouble then they are worth?

I have a lot of black walnuts in my yard and we make good use of them. Every time there is a bumper crop we process a bunch for eating/baking. We do it all by hand, just as our parents and grandparents did, country folks all.

Vacuum packed and frozen they last forever.

I've also used the hulls to make dye for clothing a couple of times.

Spence

 

[solitare1340]

I pile them on my landscape trailer until I have a large truck load. Load truck up and take to Hammons Walnut buyer. Don’t know what price is this year but should be about $16/100 lb. So I end up with about $150 and a newly stained trailer deck. Should be a buyer in your area if walnut trees are there.

 

[gunnyr]

I remember when I was younger, as a kid we would gather the nuts , dad would put on the drive way and after a few days day of driving over they would be gathered up, the hulls in one pile and the nuts put on screens to dry , there were many days I spent on squirrel watch when the nuts were on the screens. When dry they would be moved to the basement. During
the fall usually on a week end night the family would sit around the table and pick the meets out and listen tom the radio . Dad would take the hulls and mix them with 1 gallon of coal oil this was put on shovel, hoe, rake virtually any and all wood handled
items. Spent half the summers wearing gloves using the tools in the garden even then hands would still get stained.
In fact I now have a few of these tools and still use them and all with the original wood still. I enjoy posts like this
the memories come alive again' all the cookies, cakes and breads I swear I can taste them yet.
gunnyr

 

[Dave James]

Oh!! Do I remember black walnuts. Mostly the same as the others, IE run them over cracking and so forth, grandad had and old grist mill and we would drop them on the stone and crack buckets of them, pick the meat out,let grandmother have her selection, some would go to the hogs,some to the press for oil, which sold out most Ricky Tic. But my all time favorite thing to do with them was once hulled is feed them to the local grey squirrels.I laughed for hours watching them set on the porch and naw away, look at the nut and then me like they where cussing

 

[Reno]

Just so I understand when making walnut stain do you boil down that outer green leathery layer before the nut or smash the whole thing and boil. Come on guys throw me a bone here. Ha ha, but seriously I would like to make some for my squirrel rifle build.

I always waited for them to rot some. Worms and all. Then boil them. You will see the dye starting to settle out before boiling and in fact I’ve used them without boiling.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

After getting the husks off and aging the nuts for a couple months, my father would freeze them. He would take a frozen black walnut and place it point up on the anvil of his workbench vise and hit it just right with a light hammer and he could get whole nut meats out of many of them. I don't know how many years he had been doing it that way and he had just the right touch. I tried it with a tack hammer, a hammer from a kiddie tool box and the closet in weight I found to his was an old cobbler's hammer. It works fair. I haven't processed any many self in decades. There is/was a guy on the east side of lancaster, PA that buys black walnuts, but he pays in processed nut meats

 

[Reno]

I still have two pieces of T rail , railroad track. They are each about 6-8 inches long. Set them on top of a log standing up and they are perfect for cracking nuts. You have to develop your own touch fir to little or to hard. To hard and you Ky’s keep to hit your fingers to. Lol

 

[iloco]

Here is a Black Walnut Cracker that I use to crack Black
Walnuts with. Black Walnut Nut Cracker - Proudly Built in Ozark Mountains

 

[Rod Man]

A little off subject, When I showed up to one of the sites after the Middle Tennessee flood last month, you could tell someone was trying to make the best out of a bad situation. At the time I was wishing for a trailer and frontend loader or crane of some sorts...

RM

 

[sheriff john]

Daughter dyed some shirts this weekend w/black walnuts in boiling water, seeped overnight. These are green, not black yet. Worked "ok" but not the dark color you get with older ones.

Granpa made a wooden trough affair with an angled box on one end, open at the other. He jacked up his '49 Chevy's rear wheels, set the trough beneath one of the tires and poured walnuts into the "box". With the wheels spinning, walnuts shot out of the trough to hit the side of his shed, hulling nuts really well but not cracking them of course.

German grandmother made wonderful pastries from a "starter" she kept in the pantry. Pecans were another local nut we enjoyed 'til her eyesight made it hard to separate the hulls from the meats.

 

[shorthair]

Little off subject. We have 9 black walnut trees in my yard and every year the squirrels get the nuts because I never do anything with them.
I have tread your can use them for dye, oil and even baking.
Does anybody process the black walnuts or are they more trouble then they are worth?

My dad was a big fan of black walnuts to the point that he built a special nut cracker just for them out of an old manual steering gearbox.

 

[Dark Wolf]

You can also use the hulls to get fish, but the conservation REALLY does not approve.

DW

 

[iloco]

Our walnuts here in Southwest Va have not fallen yet. How is where you live.

 

[Dave James]

Over here in Chesapeake/ Tidewater area they are coming down

 

[deertraks]

If you want a good way to get good walnut dye without boiling it, I use this method. I take two five gallon buckets. One of the buckets I drill holes in the bottom and fill it with walnuts preferably as soon as they fall and put the lid on it. Set that bucket down inside another bucket and just leave it. The pure dye will gather in the bottom bucket. I did this last year. and I'm still getting dye. When I pour out the dye in other containers, I put some alcohol in with to keep mold from forming.

 

[Sam squanch]

After we were done walking home from school uphill both ways, we had to hull walnuts WITH OUR TEETH. Our mouths were stained so bad, people thought we were vampires. Come to think of it , we were vampires. Dad would come out of his coffin, and whip us until he was too tired, then we had to whip ourselves…..